


bethlehem

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, M/M, Mild Implied Incest, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:59:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’ve been through at least three one-stoplight towns today, and every neon motel sign, every stock-letter motorcourt entryway, has made it abundantly clear that there are NO VACANCIES.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bethlehem

They’ve been through at least three one-stoplight towns today, and every neon motel sign, every stock-letter motorcourt entryway, has made it abundantly clear that there are NO VACANCIES.

Dean is nursing a dislocated shoulder and a set of claw marks down one cheek, and they’ve been driving since the early hours—all he wants (and all Sam wants, if the dark circles beneath his eyes are any indication) is a mattress, of some degree of softness, to drop onto, and a full afternoon of low clouds and shut blinds under which to close his eyes. Yet it seems that everyone and their uncle has decided to bunk up along this stretch of highway through northern Colorado, and after the fourth town with its single Motel 6 blinks past them, red glowing lights chirping at them that they can’t rest there today, he smacks the wheel of the Impala with the hand of his good arm and curses under his breath.

“Talk about _no room at the fuckin’ inn_ ,” he says, and Sam smiles a little.

Afternoon stormclouds are building up in the mountains that loom and pass, dark steely blue above the reaches of the earth, and Sam leans his head against the passenger seat window, drumming his fingers absently to the turned-down bassline of the radio. Set far back from the road are wooden houses, here and there, and he imagines snow settling on them, cutting them off from civilisation. How quiet it must get. The Impala purrs under him and he shifts into the leather, watching for lightning up on the hills.

He glances at Dean after a while, once they’ve descended into the shadow of the mountains and the rocky steeps hurtling down towards the grey road. His brother’s eyes are drooping and he can see the lines around his mouth that show how much his shoulder hurts; they pass into a brief stripe of grey sunlight and Sam says, “D’you want to switch off? I can drive for a while. There’s got to be a place to crash up here somewhere.”

Dean can’t argue with that idea. He’s exhausted, and at least Sam caught a cat-nap in the passenger seat on their way up out of New Mexico. A mattress sounds good but the Impala’s cool window will do for now as a pillow to rest his head against, so he nods.

“Pull off somewhere up here in a few minutes,” he says.

Thunder growls above them, and Sam cranes his neck to peer up at the sky. By the way the clouds are roiling and convulsing you’d almost think they were about to unleash some kind of forty-day deluge over the desolate sweeps of the Rockies, washing the road and the far-set houses and their little black car right off the map. They’re the kind of stormclouds that won’t tumble far down the mountainside, but might soak the highway a little. The afternoon is summery and almost dangerous, as if something is holding its breath, waiting for the pregnant sky to break.

“Is that a sign up there?” Dean asks, and Sam pulls his attention from the storms to the far length of the road. There’s something small and white set a little ways off from the road—it almost looks like an old-fashioned arrow sign pointing up into the trees and the rocks.

“Let’s pull over there,” Sam says.

They pass through stripes of sunlight and cliff-shadow before they reach the little landmark, and it resolves itself as they draw closer into, not a sign, but a cross, a crude white-painted cross standing in the ditch-dirt.

Dean slows to a grumbling halt into the gravel on the side of the highway; one car whips past them, rocking the Impala slightly in its draft, and then there is silence. No one comes or goes in either lane; for miles ahead and behind the grey road stretches and the storm-shadows encroach.

Sam peers at the cross as Dean gets out, and keeps staring as he pops his own door open. One of those roadside memorials, it seems, if the torn pink crepe paper bundled around a bouquet of dead flowers that lies at its base is anything to go by.

He levers himself out on aching stiff legs and stretches. Dean is standing by the road, looking back the way they’ve come, holding his injured shoulder delicately with one hand. The cool wind pushes wetly past them, scattering Sam’s hair into his face.

“I’m just gonna stretch my legs,” he calls, over the gale and a quick jab of thunder; Dean lifts a hand in acknowledgment and walks a little ways down the gravel himself, rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks.

Sam picks his way across the incline of the ditch towards the memorial, scrubbing at his eyes—the horizon and the little white cross keep shifting in and out of focus, dryly. He wishes that cat-nap had lasted a little longer, this morning. The crepe-paper bouquet flutters in the wind, like a torn butterfly’s wing, and when he reaches it, finally, he crouches down to turn the flowers over on the ground.

A few dead petals break off. The cross is built up with stones around its base; now that he’s closer he can see what looks like a little locket necklace, open, its chain rusted and broken in one place, a smudged glass circle covering the image of whoever’s photograph is inside. Gingerly, with what he hopes is appropriate reverence, Sam picks it up, licks his thumb to clean the glass.

It’s a picture of a little girl—she can’t be more than five or six. Sam feels a tug in his chest—she must be who this cross is for, who the flowers have been laid here in memory of. The locket is engraved with no names, and neither is the cross. Only weatherbeaten wood and brittle flowers to stand in testament to this child.

Sam blinks to clear the dryness from his eyes and clears his throat. He can hear Dean crunching through the gravel a ways back behind him, probably about ready to head out and find a decent place to rest their heads, but he feels as if he’s desecrated this little place somehow, and it’s so sad, Sam thinks, that some nameless girl lost her life here, and it’s all gone so dry and dead. There are summer flowers growing along the hill of the ditch—it’s the least he can do, to replace the browning roses and naked bluebells in that crepe-paper bouquet.

“Sammy, come on!” Dean shouts. “Let’s hit the road.”

“Just give me a minute,” Sam calls back. He stands from his crouch and makes his wary way down the hill a little, towards a gathering of red columbine near the place where the earth begins to rise again. The clouds are gunmetal grey now, and rumbling.

He hears Dean make a noise of complaint as he bends to gather a fistful of the bright red flowers in his hand and pulls, taking them up weeds and all, unfortunately, but the blooms are nice enough that the dangling dirt doesn’t quite matter. He’s too tired to move with any haste, so he climbs the ditch again and crouches by the cross, lifting up the disintegrating crepe paper and tucking the flowers inside above their dead predecessors.

The red columbine is fragile and a few of the petals are stripped off in his hands, and God, his eyes are dry as sandpaper, blurring and smudging everything. He blinks rapidly as a gust of wind brushes up against his back like a cold hand, tousling his hair; everything feels somehow poised, as if any moment now lightning will strike into the waving mountain grass above their heads and light great swathes of the state afire.

Sam hopes to God there’s a motel somewhere down the road, and the sooner the better. He feels heavy in his bones and light in his head; driving sounds like a dangerous prospect.

“Sammy!” Dean calls again, sounding increasingly annoyed, and Sam blinks hard to clear his vision. A red petal is stuck to the center of his right palm. He swipes his hands together to brush it off and begins to rise from his crouch.

But the glance of red remains—Sam frowns, and swipes his hands together again, and this time the petal _smears_ , right up across the pads of his fingers, like—

“Sammy! For fuck’s sake, what are you doing over there?”

Finally his eyes are wet enough for his hands to shift into clearer focus, and it isn’t a petal in his hand at all. It’s a _hole—_ a dark, red, wet hole, and a growing locus of sharp, burning pain, radiating outwards from its circumference into the lines of his palm. A long streak of blood over his fingers. And even as he stares down in horror and confusion at the wound that’s appeared as quietly as an insect landing on his skin, he sees the center of the back of his left hand slowly begin to cleave—and split—and grow red and yawning, just the same.

Slowly, he turns his hands over, both palms up to face the darkening, advancing sky, and the air, atmospheric with the impending storm, seems to fill him with a sudden electricity—a brightness that raises every hair on his arms, and he hears Dean stop short behind him with a short exhaled breath and a tremulous “Sammy?”

A spear of fading sunlight slices across both brothers for the fleeting moment when Sam raises his head to Dean, too in shock—and too strangely calm—to say anything, and then the sky breaks; rain barrels down the mountains in cascading curtains, sleek and metal-dark, and Dean reaches down to grab Sam’s wrist. The downpour is deafening as it beats down around them, pummeling the red columbine into the dirt, making little rivulets of the sudden surge of blood down Sam’s arms from the holes in his hands that have come from nowhere, and Dean grips him—flinches, violently, at the warm feeling of his blood, tears his hand away—then steels himself, takes hold again, hauls him to his feet and pulls him through the muddying gravel back to the Impala, and shoves Sam into the passenger seat where he sits, frozen, eyes locked on the twin wounds that are beginning to throb with pain like heartbeats in his hands.

He expects a _what the fuck?_ or at least a _what happened?_ from Dean when he slams back into the driver’s seat, and turns his face to him almost hoping for a shout or a panicked grab at his fingers—but Dean only stares at him, mouth open and afraid, for a dreadful moment, before he turns the ignition and guns it out back into the rain, onto the road, eighty rain-slick miles an hour towards the first exit that a blue government sign promises holds lodging on the other end.

Sam watches the blood run down his arms, into the deltas of his veins.

The first motel they find blinks NO VACANCIES through the sheets of rain, but Dean pulls in anyway, parks as far away from the glass doors of the lobby as possible, and the dampening afternoon bathes them in cold blue light inside the drumming metal of the car. He reaches across the bench seat and cups Sam’s hands in his own, and Sam flinches at the shock of pain as they make contact, and together they stare, in awe and bewilderment, at the two petal-red spots in the palms of Sam’s hands.

They spend the afternoon there, cramped into the Impala and the smell of wet clothes and quickening blood, and the night as well, when it comes; Dean bandages Sam’s wounds with shaking fingers and damp gauze he found in the trunk. The blood dries on Sam’s forearms and Dean leans against the driver’s side door when dusk falls and the storm rages on, and pulls Sam in against his chest, their legs bumping and mingling along the bench seat, and they shiver in their cold clothes and watch Sam’s bandages slowly soak in rings of poppy-red—unable to understand, and sore afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction). 
> 
> Bethlehem was the birth-place of Christ.


End file.
